


straight through the smoke

by jdphoenix



Series: grey areas [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 11:26:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16701637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: Jemma expects to be tortured and killed for what she's done.She isn't.





	straight through the smoke

**Author's Note:**

> Over on tumblr an anon asked for an AU of my fic "what are enemies for." So this takes place in the same universe but as this begins prior to any of the events depicted in that, it doesn't follow that fic's continuity at all, it only has the same backstory. You don't need to read that fic to understand this one, but it might give you some added perspective.
> 
> All the same warnings apply but as the warning worthy events are touched on much, much less here, I won't be repeating them as I don't think it warrants a warning in the same way. But if you're worried, you can always go check out the original fic.
> 
> Title from "walk through the fire" by Zayde Wolf and Ruelle.

There’s blood on Jemma’s shoes. Considering the circumstances—the dead body, the untraceable gun, her own current location being the inside of a Hydra cell—it’s almost silly, but she can’t seem to stop thinking it. Her hands are fisted—she keeps telling herself to relax them or she’ll hurt herself but every time she pulls her attention away from her shoes, she discovers her nails are once again digging into her palms. If she’s not careful she’ll have scars.

A laugh bursts out of her. She quickly slaps a hand over her mouth, fearful she’ll devolve into hysterics.

 _Scars?_ She’ll be lucky to get out of this with her _life_.

The door opens. She jumps at the sound and, like a rat in a cage, searches the empty corners for a hiding place. Finding none, she slips her hands beneath her thighs and waits to learn what form her torture will take first.

It’s a little much, she thinks. The guard in the doorway is already brandishing his weapon and are they really going to kill her outright? She feels a momentary jolt of annoyance, the same feeling that’s been appearing for weeks while she’s slaved away at level _one_ , wasting her talents on useless projects. Don’t they know how _valuable_ she is? She’s Jemma bloody Simmons!

Then the guard lifts his eyes to her and smiles. Not a menacing grin or a feral smile, nothing at all like the way Lee would look at her.

“Sorry about the wait,” he says, all friendly-like. “We were trying to do a trace.” He lifts the gun—sideways, aimed at the wall, his hands nowhere near the trigger. “You get this from SHIELD?”

She nods. Or tries to. She’s not entirely sure the order passes along from her brain to her muscles, but the guard seems satisfied as though she did so she must have pulled it off.

He hums. “Yeah. Lots of those floating around since the uprising.”

He steps forward. Jemma cringes back. But he only holds the gun out to her.

“You ever need a reload—or an upgrade, that’s got a lot of kickback for a woman your size—you come find me.” He taps his badge and the name Tyler Jackson flashes in and out of view while the shiny plastic moves under the lights. “I’ll hook you up.”

She’s confused. There’s no doubt about that. But she’s spent weeks playing along, doing what’s expected of her in order to evade undue notice, and despite her failure in that arena this afternoon, long practice has her taking the gun because he seems to want her to.

He steps aside, tips his head to the door. “You’re good to go. Day shift’s clocked out already. Denny here’ll take you upstairs, Bakshi wants to debrief you before you head home.”

The lift ride is a blur. She knows it happens, knows that Denny very kindly whispers somewhere along the way that she might want to hide the weapon as it’s not polite to meet one’s superior while brandishing one so openly, but she has no real, tangible memory of it.

She still expects the torture to begin around the next corner, through the next doorway. Perhaps this is just the pre-torture, some sadistic method of drawing it all out longer? It would be just like Hydra.

.

.

At her meeting, she gives a stilted recitation of the afternoon’s events and those which led to them.

Before she leaves, she’s given a promotion.

.

.

.

.

.

She hears the door to the lab open behind her and, expecting an interruption, swiftly finishes this samples and then moves them aside, orienting them so that she’ll remember to finish with the rest after this conversation. Just as she thought, the man who comes alongside her to hitch his hip against her lab bench is not one of her assistants. Neither is he her supervisor or Alec from down the hall or anyone else she would expect.

“So,” Grant Ward says, smiling like the cat who’s caught the canary. And that’s it. Just _So_. After eight months—twelve if you count the four between him dropping her from the Bus and the last morning she checked on him via security feed before departing for Hydra—that’s all he has to say.

“Ward,” she says, figuring if he wants to keep things monosyllabic, so will she.

His eyes rove around her—to her work, the lab as a whole, the symbol painted on the far wall. Fear, old and forgotten, reaches up from the dark corner to which she’d banished it and grips her heart.

“You wanna tell me why three different guys warned me on my way here I should steer clear of you?”

She pushes the fear resolutely back down and lifts her chin. She’s a level five biochemist with an apartment near the top floor and a biweekly tea with Daniel Whitehall himself. Any threat Ward poses, she can easily mitigate.

“Because you should,” she says and turns back to her work.

She’s surprised him. She can tell because he remains frozen in her peripheral vision for three solid seconds, after which he chuckles—the sound does _not_ send a shiver through her—says, “Nice seeing you, Simmons,” and leaves.

.

.

.

That isn’t the end of it, of course. The next day, there is a slick greeting card in her mail.

_CONGRATULATIONS_

it says in big, balloon letters. Underneath, two cartoon cats, both plainly getting on in years, struggle to hold onto the strings. Inside, the message continues with

_...on your retirement._

And handwritten next to that, scrunched up in the remaining space off to the side, _from Hydra_ has been added.

 _Preemptively, of course_ , Ward has written underneath. _Good to see you ended up on the right side._

He’s also signed it _your friend_ , which seems a little presumptuous to her.

Innocuous as the card is, it puts her in a mood all day and into the night.

“Something on your mind, hon?” Julian asks. He nudges her feet with his beneath the blankets. “You’re not usually so _forceful_.”

She grits her teeth. “Other than that I asked you not to call me ‘honey’? No.”

He only smiles at her sarcasm. “You love it.”

She really doesn’t.

He kisses her shoulder then shifts away, back into his own space on the mattress. “This got anything to do with Ward?”

“How did you know about that?”

He scoffs at the ceiling. “Guy like him comes back from the dead, everybody hears about it.”

“He wasn’t _dead_.” There’s no need to be dramatic about it. He was in a SHIELD prison, one where he was treated _much_ better than his fellow Hydra agents in federal custody.

“So it _is_ about Ward.”

How is it, Jemma wonders, that he can know her well enough to see through her prevaricating about Ward but not realize how much she hates being called _honey_? It would be fascinating if it weren’t so infuriating.

“I saw he sent you a card. Should I be worried?”

She doesn’t bother to ask how he knew about the card, as it doesn’t really matter. Either he’s keeping tabs on her and has the communications division telling him all her goings on or he went through her trash. Regardless, it won’t change the outcome of this conversation and she’d really rather not prolong it.

“No,” she says honestly. She rolls after him, letting him feel her every curve before she slips out of his hands and out of bed. “Not unless you need to be on duty early tomorrow.”

“Big words for a woman who’s walking away.”

She smiles over her shoulder. “I need a pick-me-up. Would you like some tea?”

.

.

The tea was absolutely necessary. She stays up all night. One more round with Julian and, though he makes a valiant attempt at another, a coughing fit puts an end to that. And, she’s sorry to say, her sheets. Those blood stains will not be coming out.

.

.

.

“Another one?” Whitehall asks at their biweekly meeting.

She smiles sweetly. “He was annoying.”

He rolls his eyes. “Honestly, _I’d_ be annoyed if you weren’t an excellent method of culling the idiots from our ranks. How do you still manage to find romantic partners?”

She shrugs, thinking of Alec already sniffing around before she even decided Julian had outlived his usefulness. “Intelligence work does attract risk takers.”

“ _Calculated_ risks.”

She makes a show of adding another sugar to her tea. “I do think I’m worth the risk.”

“I’m sure you are,” Whitehall says dryly. “And worth the losses you accrue.” He crosses one leg over the other and taps his toes against the report she handed him upon her arrival. “We’ll be able to start a new round of trials with the data you observed.”

This time her smile is not at all affected. Whitehall recognizes her talents and even encourages them. It was his idea she stop wasting time with barbarism, as he called it, and used her natural skills to put an end to her unsatisfying relationships. In the last seven months, she’s single-handedly pushed three projects forward with her private experiments.

“Sir?” A dark haired woman appears and hands Whitehall a tablet.

“Thank you,” he says absently, already absorbed in whatever information was so important as to interrupt.

“Happy to comply.”

Unneeded for the moment, Jemma allows her attention to wander, taking in the familiar décor of Whitehall’s office. His view is impressive, but not so much more impressive than her own to warrant study. There are the antiques displayed carefully between impressive hardbacks on the bookshelves, the sleek furniture, the painting on the wall. Her stomach still clenches briefly at the sight of it.

It was so silly. The first time she was called into one of these meetings and laid eyes on the macabre battle scene centered on a dying horse, she felt so sick she thought she would have to run. But it passed. A few seconds, a gentle word of prompting from Whitehall, and she came right out of it.

She drops her gaze. She was a different person then. Still level two, still living off site, still living her old life.

“This should do it,” Whitehall says. Jemma quickly lifts her eyes from her feet before he can notice her somber expression. “Take this to Mr. Bakshi, Agent 19.”

The woman leaves as silently as she arrived, and Whitehall fixes Jemma with a smile. “Next time,” he says, “I suggest you keep the man alive for a few days, have a proper drug trial.”

That rather defeats the point, she thinks, but she agrees to consider it.

.

.

.

Alec asks her out for drinks a week later. He’s rather sure of himself, Jemma thinks, and agrees.

It only takes half a beer for her to regret the decision. He’s gone ordering her another at the bar and she’s wondering whether she might take Whitehall’s suggestion to heart or if that might cause undue trouble—Alec is a scientist and, even in Hydra, there are plenty with weak enough constitutions that the sight of him suffering will make them consider their own frailties—when someone else takes his seat.

She’s really not surprised that it’s Ward.

He’s been hovering around, is the thing. Not tonight—she didn’t see him at all tonight—but ever since that first day he appeared out of nowhere. He keeps dropping by the lab or by her table at lunch. It’s annoying.

“Oh stop it,” he says to her scowl. “Don’t pretend I’m not better company than that guy; it was obvious you were miserable.”

“Was it?” she asks. None of her fellow scientists would be bothered to see a _specialist_ bleeding from his eyeballs. Not more than they would be bothered to see anyone in that position, at least.

He smiles. It’s not at all the way he would smile on the Bus. Those private, half-shy little things were wholly a creation made to accompany the part he was playing then. This is a dangerous smile, heated and feral. “To someone who knows you, yeah.”

“You don’t know me,” she says, more quickly than she means to. She’s no more the woman from the Bus than he’s the man.

“No,” he says, contemplative. “You’re not, are you?”

Alec reappears. Jemma doesn’t look at him at all, leaves it to Ward to wave him away. He does save her drink for her though and slides it over.

“So you wanna tell me how that happened?”

“I joined Hydra,” she says, looking away to the floor. He doesn’t need to know the details—with luck, no one ever will—how she came to Hydra as a mole and came to be a member in earnest.

“I was talking more about how you got to be Hydra’s resident black widow.”

“Ah.” She tries not to squirm, but it’s difficult. How is it that just a few days ago she was sitting in Whitehall’s office, proudly talking about Julian’s death, and yet with Ward she’s uncertain and ashamed? “After I came to Hydra,” she says slowly, “one of the lab guards approached me. He forced himself on me.” She meets Ward’s eyes, daring him to judge her.

He doesn’t. Or she thinks he doesn’t. She doesn’t recognize the word he says or even the language it comes from, but it sounds like the sort of foul word one might say to refer to a man’s anatomy.

“So you took care of it yourself?” he asks and she wonders if it’s her imagination he looks impressed.

She nods once, chin high. She did nothing wrong. She can be proud of what she’s done. “I was promoted after. It turns out initiative is rewarded in Hydra.”

“Yeah, it is.” He shakes his head, darkly amused. “So that’s one, not really enough to earn you a reputation.”

She hesitates, uncertain how to explain Donald. At the time, she was still SHIELD, still reporting to Coulson. Killing the man who’d nearly killed Trip seemed like a good idea at the time, especially when Lee had gotten her so much positive attention.

“There were others,” she says instead, deciding it’s best to skim over the details. “Hugh liked to beat women.” His last girlfriend had been limping during more than one shift in the lab and Whitehall had just encouraged her to start testing her poisons on human subjects.

There was no precise moment that she changed. It wasn’t like Ward dropping his SHIELD mask. It was a slow journey from who she was then to who she is now.

About that same time she met Hugh, she lost touch with SHIELD. Hydra moved to a new base and she with them—she was a rising star, Bakshi said, too valuable to be lost in the shuffle. She tried to signal for extraction, but none came. After the move, she spent every weekend wandering the city, hoping to make contact somehow, see some sign of Coulson trying to get in touch. But there was nothing.

She remembers standing in her bathroom while Hugh’s body cooled on her floor, staring at her own face in the mirror and thinking—because she couldn’t say the words aloud, not while she was inside Hydra— _I hate you_. She wonders when she stopped hating the woman she’s become.

And then she wonders instead when she stopped thinking about it.

“Well, I’m glad,” Ward says. “Hydra’s a dangerous place but you took care of yourself. I’m impressed.”

There’s something in his voice that reminds her of the way he once called her brave and though he isn’t that man, she suddenly wants, desperately, to be that woman again.

“But next time, how about you just call me? I’ll make ‘em wish they’d never been born.”

She leans forward, lets her feet slip across the space between them to nudge his beneath the table. “I’m perfectly capable of that.”

“I’m sure you are,” he says, matching her low tone. “But I want to help you.”

“Do you?” She considers reminding him about last spring and the med-pod, but decides against it. She doesn’t really care about his justification for that; she cares about how he plans on helping her.

“Why? You got something in mind?”

.

.

He is a spectacular kisser. She barely has the presence of mind to drag him into the dingy bathroom at the back of the bar.

“Wrong door,” he says, though that doesn’t stop him biting a bruise at the hinge of her jaw.

She gasps, going momentarily still from pain and pleasure both before returning to her aim of undoing his belt. “Just quickly,” she says.

To that, he says something typically male.

She smiles while his words vibrate along her neck. “I want to know whether you’re worth it.”

Her back meets the door and her eyes meet his. His grip isn’t painful on her upper arms, but it is firm and _very_ unamused. “I am absolutely worth it.”

It’s easy to be proud when she knows what he doesn’t: she wants to know whether he’s worth taking to her bed or if she’ll be following Whitehall’s advice and locking him in a containment pod for experimentation and observation when they get back to base.

“Prove it,” she says.

 .

.

He does. Very well.

.

.

.

Jemma’s comfortable, coming out of a deep, deep sleep, and the sound of voices is most unwelcome.

“-washed.”

“You’re sure?” comes a voice annoyingly heavy with concern.

And then another, gruffer voice that reminds her of Julian’s self-assurance. “Nothing our people have been able to gather indicates she’s anything but a willing convert.”

“Hundred percent.”

Jemma smiles into her pillow. Perhaps Grant’s voice isn’t _so_ unwelcome after last night. The way he touched her in that bathroom was most promising and afterward-

“John used to do it this way when he needed someone more mobile. Trauma breaks ‘em down, a few hours with a compliance specialist for some unremembered conditioning, and then all it takes is some subtle reinforcement from time to time to keep the brain from figuring a way around it.”

There was no afterward. They had sex in the bar and then went out to the alley. She thought for a moment he was going to fuck her again and was just getting ready to object—the brick wall was far too cold at her back to make it worth it—when he apologized. She thought it was for the cold, but how could he know about that? And that’s when she felt the gun against her ribs.

She opens her eyes. She’s in a bed, in what looks alarmingly similar to a med-pod. Ward is standing in the doorway along with Coulson and a man Jemma doesn’t recognize at all. There’s an eagle on the wall behind them.

She should’ve taken him straight to the lab and that containment pod.

 


End file.
